Email is good.

Pen Pals is just a great concept! You write back and forth with someone, that’s it. It’s cooler with paper and stamps. The tactile multimedia nature, the time delays, the old school vibes. I used to write my younger half sister letters when I was in college. She found one recently and sent me photos.…

This is the kind of thing that keeps me interested in this whole subject of email. Especially as it pertains to “everyone”. Not just specifically niche-y email-nerd flows, but the general usage of email by the common citizen of Earth. This is just a joke. It’s a decent joke. I probably would have found it…

The oldest trick in the book is the Gmail one where you do like: And that still comes to my main email address (the one without the “+” and the extra text). Then if that gets leaked to spammers or whatever, I know what site it was, and I can set up a filter to…

BORING:“I emailed them and am waiting to hear back.” SPICY, EXCITING:“The trap is set, now we wait…” Dave Rupert

Most email is from one person to one person. Or at least handled by one person. But not all of it! Customer support email is a classic example, especially customer support email that doesn’t have some exotic middleman ticketing system in between. Perhaps a company has an email address like support@widgets.corp and that’s just how…

I like this little cute message: Although… in my case, it’s not actually a real indicator that I have email at any of my main inboxes. If I type mail, I can see the messages. Since I’m on macOS I figured it would be whatever Mail.app is seeing, but that’s doesn’t seem to be the…

What we’re calling AI now already has been involved with email. Spam! Filtering spam is an AI job, and it’s been killing it for quite a while now. I hope email providers keep at it. Then there is AI at the writer and reader levels of email. Which… also is related to spam. If I…

I read a thing once (I really should find it) about DevOps and notifications (I think) where the author said something like: Email is a terrible notification system. The only thing worse than email is everything else. The point was like… you should probably have phone or SMS-based alerting systems for DevOps problems, but that…

Obvious? Probably. That’s part of the reason I published my thing going through my own inbox. Just as a little social confirmation that my inbox situation isn’t that different than most others, which from the feedback I heard is true. I also think this is a potential problem with email innovation. This conclution is easy…

One of the things I’d like to root out about people’s relationship to email is whether having email hanging around in your inbox is actually a problem or not. Is there a fairly universal answer to this? Are people with 10,000 emails in their inbox bad at email? As in… Are they stressed? Do they…